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Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

(starship.rs)
457 points benoitg | 1 comments | 24 Jun 25 11:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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hiAndrewQuinn ◴[24 Jun 25 12:36 UTC] No.44365512[source]▶
I like maximalist prompts, and indeed Starship is what Shell Bling Ubuntu [1] installs on a new dev machine. But they're not everyone's cup of tea.

If I wanted to recommend to someone the min-maxed, highest density thing they could add to their prompt, it would simply be the time your current prompt appeared + the amount of time the last command you ran took.

These two pieces of information together make it very easy for you (or your local sysadmin (or an LLM looking over your digital shoulder)) to piece together a log of exactly what happened when. This kind of psuedo-non-repudiation can be invaluable for debugging sessions when you least expect it.

This was a tip I distilled from Michael W. Lucas's Networking for System Administrators a few years ago, which remains my preferred recommendation for any developers looking to learn just enough about networking to not feel totally lost when talking to an actual network engineer.

Bonus nerd points if you measure time in seconds since the UNIX epoch. Very easy and fast to run time delta calculations if you do that:

    [0 1719242840] $ echo "foo"
    [0 1719242905] $ echo "fell asleep before hitting enter" && sleep 5
    [5 1719242910] $
[1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu
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skydhash ◴[24 Jun 25 12:45 UTC] No.44365588[source]▶
For personal workstation, the current directory is enough. Maybe I change the color based the status of the last command. That’s pretty much the only information I need before entering any command. Everything else can be accessed when I really need it.
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acedTrex ◴[24 Jun 25 13:00 UTC] No.44365734[source]▶
You don't need to know what branch you're on before running commands? I cant tell you the number of times ive been on the wrong branch executing stuff.
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zikduruqe ◴[24 Jun 25 13:24 UTC] No.44366003[source]▶
For me the AWS integration is nice. That way I know what account I'm on, and what region among my dozens of windows.

For example:

    …/.config master on AWS_Prod (use2)
starship.toml:

    [aws]
    format = 'on [($profile )(\($region\) )]($style)'
    style = 'bold #B23D2F'
    symbol = " "  <- cloud symbol
    [aws.region_aliases]
    us-east-1 = 'use1'
    us-east-2 = 'use2'
replies(1): >>44366174 #
1. acedTrex ◴[24 Jun 25 13:42 UTC] No.44366174[source]▶
Oh ya, for work the kubeconfig integration is absolutely essential, i bounce between local clusters and shared nonprod clusters all the time and while its not an outage to break the nonprods its going to annoy a lot of people so its nice to know which one is active.